#AutIMFAR Partner Orgs: autchat, ASAN, AWN, NOS Magazine, and TPGA
[image: The Twitter logos for five organizations: autchat: a rainbow background with a black infinity symbol and black text reading: "#autchat"; The Autistic Self Advocacy Network: a spiraling rainbow heptagon on a white background; Autism Women's Network: a pink lowercase "a" overlaid on a light-blue-and-brown illustrations of dragonflies and flowers, above the lowercase black text "autism women's network"; NOS Magazine: a black circle on a white background, with an illustration of an incandescent light bulb drawn in white and surround by a sunburst in dashed rainbow colors; and Thinking Person's Guide to Autism: All-caps black text on a white background reading "Thinking Person's Guide to Autism," with "Person's" in white text on a black arrow.]

Autism research tends to focus more on causation and cures than on helping existing autistic community members. From both practical and basic rights perspectives, this needs to change. Too many core autistic needs are still under-researched, and, as a result, proper supports and understanding are too often lacking. We are hoping to help autism research better serve the interests of autistic people, and more fully address the research matters autistic people want addressed.

With this in mind, #AutIMFAR is meant to connect autistic communities with autism research communities directly, during IMFAR, the International Meeting for Autism Research. Such conversations don't happen often enough at IMFAR due to a variety of barriers: cost, sensory bomb conference environment, having to face people who don’t see why they shouldn’t aim to cure or normalize autistic people, travel stress, etc.

If you are an autistic person who is interested in autism research and/or an autism researcher, we hope you will participate in #AutIMFAR.

The chat is intended to be between any autistic individual (including self-diagnosed) and/or autism researcher who wishes to participate, as much as anything on Twitter can be controlled (popular Twitter chats are sometimes targeted by Twitter Bots of Dubious Nature). If you are a friend, parent, non-researcher autism professional, ally, or other party interested in autism research, we encourage you to RT as much of the chat as you’d like (thank you!). We ask that participants abide by TPGA’s community guidelines, the short version of which is: It is OK to disagree, but not OK to insult those with whom you disagree: www.thinkingautismguide.com/p/community-guide.html.